Great Falls tribune. [volume] (Great Falls, Mont.) 1885-1890, 1887-01-08
AMERICAN I~LLIBERALISM.
Written for the Tribune:


that everywhere surround US, we are i'm
pressed by the strong and unmistakabie
tendency of the American people toward
illiberalism. One hundred years or more
have passed over the dial of our national
history, each in it's turn has brought its
Iabors, trials and changes, during their
long and eventful course. Political parties
have risen, flourished and vanished, wars
of defense and conquest nave taken their
blood and given their recompense, secess-
ion and rebellion have come with cruel
desolation and left the Union bleeding
and faint, the few and scattered colonists
of independence fame have multiplied to
a swarming nation of sixty millions, the
narrowed territory of colonial times has
grown and broadened to an extensive con-
tinent bounded but by the icy north and
the burning south, yet through all these
trials and troubles, labors and triumphs,
through all these years of growth and
progress we have been marching from the
manhood of individual sovereignty
to state sovereignty, from state
sovereignty to national consolidation
and from national consolidation to cen
tralizatio2, ~narrowness and liberalism
We have become a nation possessed Of a
characteristic nationality, marTed by pet
ty prejudice and narrowed by inherent
selfishness. We lave become as unrea-
sonable in social discrimination, as lib
eral in legislation, as blind to the rights
of personal liberty, as jealous and exclus-
i've in our foreign policy, as any of the
contracted, conservative countries of the
old world. Once America was the synon-
YIN of freedom. Once she was the below
ed home of the liberty loving people of
of every class and birth, whether from the
straw-covered houses Of pauper Europe,
the bamboo huts of heather China, or the
palm leaf tents of benighted Africa; the
land that welcomed to her shores alike
the free and oppressed, the rich and poor,
the noble and those of common blood, as
friends and co-workhrs of a free, liberal
and cosmopolitan government. But now
she is but the home of 1meracans-the
mercantile, the money-making, the money
loving; the land that scans with jealous
eye every N from foreign shores, that
has emancipated the enslaved and NAL
treated black but to subject him to the
humiliation of scorn and Pharisaic o n
tempt; that has formed treaties of mutu-
al friendship with the Chinese Empire
and then in violation of every law Of ma
tons and humanity drives her unoffend-
ing emigrants from their burning homes,
fred by cruel and ruthless hands; that is
even 0 forging iron-clad statutes that
shall discourage, and it may be prohibit
forever the immigration of European la
Dor; that is encroaching step by step, ever
faster and faster, upon the sacred domain
of individual righj. We do not wish to
eauiminate our country, with wanton
malice to charge her with m~isgivings and
wrongs that she is o guilty of, bat with
an earnest appreciation of the right, and a
regard for the eternal principles Of hui
man justice, we cannot but regret and de
snounce the many iliberaf acts of our gov
eminent and the pernicious tendency of
public opinion. We believe in national
ethics, in a national conscience. We be-
lieve it to be incumbent upon public
opinion to be as deferential to the rights
and civilities Of other nations, as consci-
entious in its advocation, as responsible
for its influence, as regarding to the nat
ural laws of humanity, as any Il individ-
ual is in duty bound to render those self
same obligations to his fellow men. Yet
the American people no longer shape
their policy and measure their acts by the
sole standard of moral right and imparti-
al justice, but by the standard of financial
profit and political and social advantage;
they sell their labor and highest efforts
for money-value; they play the game of
life to satisfy their ~ayarice and increase
their personal gain; they seek power and
wealth to compliment their ambition and
to f1atter their vanity and pride. For
sooth it seems as We rowricher. we grow
meaner; as we grow greater, we grow
smaller. In the earlier days of the repub-
lie it was not thus. Then a healthy, lib
eral sentiment characterized the people
and the government. Then no man ever
dreamt of closing the gates OF the nation
to foreign commerce. of retarding the adj
vancing tide of immigration, of employ
ing the government for private ends, and
to increase its power at the exnense Of in